Microsoft has announced the official pricing for Office 365 subscriptions. Microsoft says that subscriptions will provide users with a host of possibilities and will allow offices and families to get Office on multiple devices for one price. A single subscription allows users to legally use Office across a wide variety of devices, including PCs, tablets, and Macs.

Documents created using the Office 365 subscription offering can be access from the cloud, and users can personalize their Office experience. Microsoft says that it will update Office more frequently to support new use scenarios and subscribers. The subscription service will always have the latest updates.

Office 365 Home Premium covers an entire household and allows Office applications be used simultaneously on multiple devices in the home. Each user gets their own individual Microsoft account with their own settings and access to their own documents. A single subscription offers access to all Office applications, including word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, and OneNote.

The Home Premium version allows subscribers to use Office on five machines at one time shared among all the users in the home. The five devices that can access Office 365 Home Premium can be changed at any time. The subscription gives users a 20 GB SkyDrive account and 60 minutes of Skype World Calling each month. Office 365 Home Premium will be available in retail stores and online stores for $99.99 billed annually. A free 30-day trial will be offered.

Office 365 Small Business Premium is aimed at businesses with between one and 10 employees. The service offers access to all Office applications in the home service, plus access to Lync. The service allows Office to be used on five computers or Macs for each single user. Subscribers also get a 25 GB Outlook mailbox for sharing calendars, contacts, scheduling, and task lists and 10 GB of professional-grade cloud storage for the organization along with 500 MB for each user.

The business service allows users to hold online meetings with their own video cameras and offers the ability to set up a public website with no hosting fees. Office 365 Small Business Premium will be available for $149.99 billed annually.

For customers that prefer the "traditional" Office experience, standalone versions of the Office 2013 will be available. Office Home and Student 2013 will be available for $139.99 and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Office 2013 Home & Business is priced at $219.99 and Office 2013 Professional will retail for $399.99.

I also have a hard time seeing this take off for home use. I bought a copy of Office 2007 4 years ago for $80, with 3 licenses. The only major thing missing is Outlook, but I tend to just use my phone, iPad or a web browser for my personal email account(s), and only use Outlook for work.

I think the business part might make more sense, especially with the amount of email storage. I work for a small company, and it does take time maintaining our own email server, certificates, etc.., and we have people running 3 different versions of Office. So this looks lkike a good idea for us as a small business (< 15 people).